THAT EVENING

I see a bio of Paul Newman. He and Joanne Woodward stayed together for half a century. When asked how, both said "Hollywood marriages break up because film scheduling forces you apart. When we had trouble over communication or money or jealous, we took time to figure out what'd work under current conditions, and changed our rules to fit." Bend, not break. Smart!

Too bad the biopic writer isn't. The narrator spouts howlers like "...the film that jettisoned him to stardom..." Not rocketed, not jetted. No, the scriptwriter wanted a cooler-sounding word. And found one. And... didn't look it up to be sure what it really means.

Next, a Star Trek: Enterprise episode, "Spacetime Rhapsody". Reality alters so everyone bursts into song, blurting all their private stuff. Christine gets a great sultry number in the bar; Spock, an agonized solo reprise of the same tune, treating love as an insoluble equation: "I'm the X"--or, as he sings it, "I'm the Ex". Uhura and Singh, agonized parallel numbers about sublimating personal trauma into career fulfillment.

Not bad music. Astonishingly good singing. And sophisticated, complex lyrics that actually make some sense for sober, repressed, ambitious, brilliant meritocrats, I guess...

But this is how the elite talk (and think) now. Would they still, centuries in the future? Does culture stand still? God, I hope not.

The show takes for granted that successful maturity is ambitious, intellectual, repressed, and often miserable underneath--a personality model going back all the way to Freud, and well-suited for both 19th century imperialism and 21st century capitalism. But for Star Trek's post-capitalist 24th?

As when I heard Newman & Woodward, I feel like a child struggling to grasp grownup conversation. Or... is it my autism making them sound so hollow? Temple Grandin wrote "I need solid sensory images for abstractions, or they're meaningless." I'm the same.

Am I immature, or just finding their vision of maturity sterile and lonely? Mired in a pessimism appropriate for the bog of capitalism, but not for Roddenberry's idealistic vision. Which is not far from my own.

THAT NIGHT...

I'm rushing through the halls of Starfleet Academy, all glass and chrome and polished black stone. I head for an exam, but get caught in a crowd leaving a TV studio--filming a gameshow with audience participation. I ask a couple "Did you get on the air?" but they don't know much English and I don't even recognize their native tongue. Flounder a minute or two, then give up and hurry on to my exam.

A huge lecture hall. Seats full, test just begun; I'm a minute late. My seat's assigned, in the front row, so I can't hide; scurry to it under my teacher's liquid green eye. Her ears turn to track me to my seat; her tail switches, impatient. Intimidating, but so beautiful--that unicorn glow. She's a pioneer--the only one on staff yet. But then, the portal to the mythic realm opened just two years ago. Lightning-fast assimilation! Though really, no surprise. Smart, sexy, magical, kind... and their superhuman auras.

Of course I have a crush on my professor.

On my seat: a pillow, a clipboard with a test on it with my name penciled in... and my answers, too! Did AI anticipate, to save us writing the obvious? I skim--they do seem to be what I'd write.

Except... one answer just says "15-16." Sixteen what? Uneasy feeling they're parts of me I've met in dreams. Am I still that shattered? At least Eve only had three faces! That "15-16" really needs an explanation, so try to erase it and write about my current self more unified self.

But my only eraser just smears it to a gray blot and then breaks. The blot leaves me nowhere to explore my doubts, update my self-description.

I get out a pen and write over the half-erased "15-16", darkening it til it's readable again despite the gray mess. Gotta settle for that.

Our shining future! Billions for starships, AI and portals to the mythosphere; but not one dime for erasers.

Sigh! I really wanted to impress her.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Future, glass & black: Star Trek! Big windows, black space...
• Showbiz, couple, communication trouble: in Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward said "Communications trouble? Take time to work it out; shift your bylaws if you need to. Beats divorce!"
• Late for exam: months ago, a City water truck crushed my parked car. Claiming damages from the city is complex and intimidating, and I've put it off for weeks.
• Bipedal unicorn: the same species as this Unicorn Emissary I met in a dream last year, and again on a Unicorn-built "Arabian Nights" Starship, a few months ago. She looked nothing like Princess Celestia, Twilight's teacher on My Little Pony, but seemed similar--wise, warm, diplomatic, sexy, but... formidable. I didn't want to be the butt of her dry, understated humor.
• Brilliant, willowy, sexy girl in a futurist setting: Christine Chapel in her slinky jumpsuit?
• 15-16 facets of me? Odd, since I recently dreamed of My Nine Selves--I knew they'd shrunk from more massive fragmentation (15, 16 or more) down to a more manageable three clusters of three. Is this dream warning I've backslid?
• AI autofills my answers: Is my inner AI on autopilot, stuck in old habits? An obsolete self-image?
• I can't change the text: my dream's playing a joke here, as lucid dreamers may have already suspected. Stephen La Berge thinks your brain in REM can't maintain texts or numbers, so reading clocks or text twice will often reveal you're dreaming. But this dream reverses the Bergian trick--it clings to this text so fiercely it sabotages me so I can't update it! This isn't illiteracy OR blind habit. This is a trickster.
• Try to communicate with bad tools:
  1. Literal. All the erasers on my pencils break off--the ones at my local store are all Chinese-made cheapies that break in a day.
  2. Star Trek: they used such abstract, neurotypical terms for love/sex and work/career. Their language fostered ambition and drive--but not happy, rounded, big-hearted people.
• ACTION 1: Go get real pencils & erasers at an art supply store. Not just to write with, to DRAW. I like hybrid art, with some nondigital texture, better than digital (whether AI or not).
• ACTION 2: Fill in the damn City form as well as I can, and TURN IT IN. Better to get some damages than none.
• ACTION 3: Update my self-image. Yeah, I'm less unified than most neurotypicals; I was shattered, but less so now. Habit overestimates my faultlines, sort of autofills my self-image as broken. Yet that autofilling part is powerful--for good or ill.
• ACTION 4: Uh... find a unicorn. Or human equivalent. Though I won't attract her back unless I let my own power show. And mine is far from human--I lack ambition, drive, intellectual abstraction, repression, jealousy. Why, I'm just not Starfleet material!

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